A TELEVISION star swigs her mineral water and throws the bottle into a recycling bin. In another scene, in the American version of The Office, the workers complain about metallic-tasting reusable water bottles and switch to filtered tap water instead.

They are among the television stars in shows from sitcoms to detective dramas who are lining up to bombard their fans with subliminal messages. “Behaviour placement” is aimed at persuading audiences to lead greener, healthier and happier lives.

The shows, including Law and Order and 30 Rock, a comedy starring Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey — the one throwing the water bottle — are first being broadcast in America but many will be aired in Britain in the next few weeks.

NBC, one of the big four American television networks, has even hired psychologists to drop environmentally friendly nods into the scripts.

The initiative reflects the “nudge effect” promoted by Richard Thaler, an economist, and Cass Sunstein, a lawyer who is advising President Obama on how to teach people to avoid bad decisions, from jumping red lights to eating junk food.
“People do not want to be hit over the head with issues, but including aspects in the programming makes it resonate more successfully with viewers,” said Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC.

Others disagree. The Week magazine, which covers American current affairs, describes such programmes as “cynical and manipulative”.

“The pressure to be eco-conscious is reaching a new high,” said Christopher Rosen, a writer. “NBC implies that people are too dumb to make healthy decisions on their own … television should stick with what works — product placement, where they awkwardly jam products into their programmes to make people want to buy them.”

Tim Kring, the creator of Heroes, the US science fiction series broadcast on BBC2, said he first became aware of behaviour placement when a lorry appeared in an episode picking up recyclable soft drinks bottles.

In America the scene prompted oil companies to pay for advertisements around the show in a bid to associate themselves with the green message.

Surveys over the past 30 years have consistently found top journalists are much more liberal than the rest of America. At the same time, public opinion polls show Americans see the media as politically biased, inaccurate and an obstacle to solving society’s problems. The numbers document a credibility crisis for journalism that only a swift move towards professionalism and fairness can fix.

The MRC has now created a one-stop online resource, “Media Bias 101,” detailing more than 40 surveys revealing journalists’ liberal opinions and the public’s attitudes about bias. The report also contains page after page of quotes from top reporters discussing media bias — most denying the problem, but some admitting it.

■ A 1995 Pew Research Center survey of journalists found 48% thought there had been “too little” coverage of Bill Clinton’s achievements, vs. two percent who saw “too much” coverage. The same survey in 2004 found most national journalists (55%) thought the media were “not critical enough” of George W. Bush, vs. just 8% who thought the media were “too critical” of Bush.

■ Nearly all of the media elite (97%) agree “it is a woman’s right to decide whether or not to have an abortion,” with five out of six (84%) strongly agreeing with this statement.

HOW JOURNALISTS VOTE

■ More than four-fifths of surveyed journalists voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election between 1964 and 1976.

■ In every presidential election since 1992, most Americans saw the media as backing the Democrats. In 2008, 70% of Americans said journalists wanted Barack Obama to win, vs. nine percent who felt the media favored John McCain.

■ Every year from 2001 through 2009, Gallup found roughly three times more Americans said the media are too liberal vs. those who claimed a pro-conservative bias.

■ Nearly nine out of ten Americans (87%) “strongly or somewhat agreed that the news media have their own political and public policy positions and attempt to influence public opinion.”

■ A 2007 Harvard survey found 84% believe the news media have too much influence on voters’ decisions.

Can you imagine him talking about the Obama daughters this way? Via EW, h/t Hot Air:

“We were, as we often do, making jokes about people in the news and we made some jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter [Bristol]… and now they’re upset with me…” Letterman says on tonight’s show. “These are not jokes made about her 14-year-old daughter. I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl…. Am I guilty of poor taste? Yes. Did I suggest that it was okay for her 14-year-old daughter to be having promiscuous sex? No.” Saying he hopes he’s “cleared part of this up,” Letterman extended an invitation to Palin to come on the show as a guest.

Just as with all his previous interviews with the broadcast network anchors, Barack Obama had nothing to fear from his final pre-election sit-down, this time with CBS’s Katie Couric, who laughed along with him about being a “nervous wreck” on election day, raised Jeremiah Wright not to press him about Wright’s incendiary anti-American rants but to ask if the McCain campaign had given its “approval” to a state party to raise the topic, and concluded by fawning: “If things go your way on Tuesday and you become this nation’s first African-American President, what will that mean to you personally?”

In the excerpts from the interview conducted Sunday in Columbus, Ohio and aired on Monday’s CBS Evening News, Couric posed four questions, starting with “fears that perhaps an unbridled, unchecked, filibuster-proof Democratic majority will overreach and move the country too far to the left. How can you assuage people’s concerns about that?” Instead of hitting him on how much the decision by the McCain campaign and the news media to drop Wright helped him avoid a subject that would have hurt in swing states, she treated Republicans as the miscreants:
“The Pennsylvania Republican Party is starting to run an ad in that state which features your former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying quote, ‘God damn America.’ Do you think they would have run that ad without the approval of the McCain campaign?”

Sunday’s CBS Evening News plugged the interview with a clip of Couric asking Obama about Zeituni Onyango, whom the Times of London late last week found living in a Boston housing project: “You have an aunt who’s been living in this country, apparently illegally, for four years and you campaign says ‘any and all appropriate laws should be followed.’ So, would you support her being deported to Kenya?” Times of London article: www.timesonline.co.uk

A CBSNews.com posting with interview video and a transcript does not have that question, but does have several others not aired Monday night, including: “What did the McCain team do in the course of this campaign that made you the angriest?” See: www.cbsnews.com

The questions aired in the first half of the hour-long Monday, November 3 CBS Evening News (Washington, DC’s CBS affiliate did not air the second half, but Couric did not say more of the interview would air in that second half hour):

# Let’s talk about single-party rule for a moment. Some critics describe it as all accelerator and no brakes. There are fears that perhaps an unbridled, unchecked, filibuster-proof Democratic majority will overreach and move the country too far to the left. How can you assuage people’s concerns about that?

# What are you most afraid of on election day? (“Aren’t you going to be a nervous wreck?” And: “Or maybe not sleeping much on Monday night?”)

# The Pennsylvania Republican Party is starting to run an ad in that state which features your former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying quote, “God damn America.” Do you think they would have run that ad without the approval of the McCain campaign?

# If things go your way on Tuesday and you become this nation’s first African-American President, what will that mean to you personally?

Open Letter to ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and Affiliates, also The Arizona Republic, U.S.A. Today and The East Valley Tribune,

I thank God for computers and e-mail, without which, I would only see and hear ONE side of the news. I do use the word “News” loosely.

I’m from the old school where a Journalist reported the facts, all the facts. That means when someone says something, you check the facts before reporting it. Obviously the new school allows you to editorialize and choose which facts you deem pertinent. We the public used to count on you for the news. Not anymore. You have tarnished the name “Journalist.”

The media is having a love affair with Obama and you are not even trying to report the news. The bias is so obvious it makes me sick. You let news of Obama’s ties with questionable people go so you can hatchet McCain and Palen for the least things. Are you hypnotized are just stupid with bias? Is your love that blind?

Do you really think Socialism is what America needs. Do you really think this man is RIGHT for a country that he and his wife privately hate? Perhaps I gave you too much credit for being thinking and educated people.

If it were not for Conservative Radio, the Drudge Report and all the e-mails I receive, I would never hear anything unflattering about Obama and I would not have heard anything flattering about McCain. For instance, all the flack about McCain being born in the Panama Canal. That got a lot of play. The fact that a law suit has been filed about Obama being born in Kenya has never been mentioned on your shows or in your papers. It’s been fair game to hit McCain and Palen with any and everything, but don’t mention Obama’s middle name, his wife, his kids, his ears, his race [which by the way is not black]. The man has ties to terrorist, bigots and Islam, but there are no questions from you.

Do you realize how you have beaten down President Bush? Never do you mention that for the last two years he has had NO cooperation from a Democratic Congress. He is blamed for everything that’s gone wrong. You never mention how the Democrats contributed to the financial problems. The old school would at least show Honor to the Office. The new school has spent too much time with “academia,” another word for “Liberal.”

In Orissa, India, killings of Christians and 5,000 homes have been burned, but we have not been informed by you of this condition. Where did you go to school? Better yet, did you go to school? You don’t even try to hide your feelings. Your bias is so apparent that it makes your reports unbelievable.

I think you must take responsibility at this time for the division in our country . I am seventy-five years old and have never been as angry with the opposition as I am this time and it’s 90% your fault. If our country is divided, guess who’s to blame? You have continually fanned the fire with your bias reports. No wonder the newspapers are in trouble and the television news ratings are down.

Obama has promised to significantly cut defense spending, including saying “I will slow our development of future combat systems.”

John McCain has vowed: “We must continue to deploy a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent, robust missile defenses and superior conventional forces that are capable of defending the United States and our allies.”

In a 2001 interview, Obama said he regretted that the Supreme Court “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

In the same interview, Obama criticized the Supreme Court because it “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.”

Obama has focused on empathy, rather than legal reasoning and restraint, as his basis for appointing judges, saying, “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy…to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old.”

McCain opposes judicial activism, saying, “my nominees will understand that there are clear limits to the scope of judicial power.”

Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline

Column By MICHAEL S. MALONE

Oct. 24, 2008 —

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game — with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer,” because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living — and when I knew her, scary — grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I’ve spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I’m deeply ashamed right now to be called a “journalist,” you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there’s always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word “said” — muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. — to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can’t achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty — especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the ’60s I saw a lot of subjective “New” Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from “real” reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I’d spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else’s work — not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I’d always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes — and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who’d managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation’s leading newspapers, many of whom I’d written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith — and I know the day and place where it happened — was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I’d already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass — no, make that shameless support — they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather — not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake — but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far — such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain’s daughter’s MySpace friends — can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side — or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer — when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn’t agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it’s because we don’t understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide — especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country &

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation’s best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world’s largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling “Virtual Corporation.” Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, “The New Heroes.” He has been the ABCNews.com “Silicon Insider” columnist since 2000.